New empowerment strategy?
 

Ok...I'm a dominions newb. A total newb. So please bear with me.

Does anyone consider it to be a viable strategy to start a pretender off with a lot or "3" ranks as a rainbow mage and then empower to 4 for purposes of getting all or almost all of the bless effects for sacred troops?

Also, has anyone ever found a blood magic site? I never did despite generally having blood 2 on my rainbow mage searcher. At least not in the sense that I would have a steady income of blood slaves or a blood summoning site that required fewer slaves to do something neat.

Final question...Castles only draw resources from provinces you control, right? Not adjacent enemy provinces?

Re: New empowerment strategy?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">The bless effects are determined on pretender creation, not their current statistics.

Re: New empowerment strategy?
 

I just got my manual yesterday. Can you tell me how you know that? In the manual? Experience?

This would be a good thing if you got killed and lost some skills, though. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

Re: New empowerment strategy?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Graeme Dice said.

Yes. They are very rare though...

Only your provinces.

Re: New empowerment strategy?
 

There are not alot of blood sites but the ones that are out there can be VERY important to find.

Castles only draw from neighboring dominions you own. I rarely play in a circle-growth mode spreading equally from a home province (lots of pros and cons there) but I always try to remember to take every neighbor attached to a castle.

I often took gods with 2 or 3 in as many magics as possible as searchers. I figured that if I found a ton of air sites, then I would have a ton of air gems, I would want to be very capable of using those gems effectively, it wouldnt hurt me any to empower him another level in air, etc etc etc. If I found lots of earth gem sites, etc etc etc.

In other words I let my random luck decide where my pretender was headed. Having him 2 or 3 levels toward that goal was good for searching and for empowering (not too expensive). At 3 or 4 in a magic you can usually make 1 or 2 items that can give you the next few levels in that magic bringing you up to 5 or 6 or even 7 in a magic that you just happened to find a ton of sites giving you gems for. Ahhh the POWER!!!

Re: New empowerment strategy?
 

Looks like forts no longer pull resources from other forts. Glad to see that gone. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

Re: New empowerment strategy?
 

Thanks for the responses. I am having an interesting time against Ry'leh (?sp). And I'm thinking about building a fortress along my coastline directly adjacent to his home province. Does anyone else do that? It's good to know that it won't pull resources from his adjacent territories. I would love to be able to go down there and seige him, but I haven't even found troops that can go underwater yet as it is early in the game.

I'm adopting that same strategy with my pretender...took a sage and ulm. Really makes the research flow well. I'm actually ahead of all the ai nations in research atm if you can believe that.

Thanks for telling me that there *are* some blood sites out there. I was beginning to wonder. I usually only take 2 in blood because of how easy it is to raise if you can get some hunters.

By the way, do those items you get change your skill levels on the overland map or just in combat?

I guess the general concensus is that bless effects do not change with subsequent empowerment of the pretender or with the pretender's disempowerment by death and being called back?

Re: New empowerment strategy?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">The items that say something like "1 level nature" or whatever increase the magic path on both the strategic and tactical maps.

The devs have said elsewhere that your blessings are fixed at god creation, so no amount of empowerment or death will effect them.

Re: New empowerment strategy?
 

licker,

Thank you for clarifying that. I guess now that is a reason not to be a pure rainbow as I have started to be.... 3 in everything but blood, 2 in blood. Which is nice...the feeling that I have "given up" something makes me feel less guilty about all those magic sites I find. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

Has anyone ever found a holy or unholy site? I've had priests search but always come back having found nothing.

Re: New empowerment strategy?
 

Holy/Unholy sites do exist, just a bit rare.
A few sites do give blood income (Damned Merchant, for instance; there's also some non-blood magical academy site that does, too) or blood summoning bonuses, but they're far rarer than brigand lairs et al. But blood slaves are mostly captured, not received from sites. There's also a Demon Lord which gets free slaves, but not at a terribly quick rate.

Re: New empowerment strategy?
 

Thanks, Takwus,

Right now my only blood mage in some instances is my pretender. Which is not really all that impressive for the use of blood magic. He has better things to do that just walk around hunting blood slaves. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/tongue.gif Like finding magic sites or contributing to research or forging major magical items that only he can do with all his rainbow magic.

I wouldn't want to miss out on a nice site like that.

It's also good to know that there are priestly sites. I guess I'll still send those guys around looking even though they usually won't find anything.

Does anyone think that a nice idea for a theme might be one wherein taking blood slaves did not yeild increased unrest? Perhaps costing 40 points or so?

Re: New empowerment strategy?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">I find it especially nice to make a prophet from a holy mage, so that it can site-search at holy 4 as well as 2 other fields. I've found quite a few holy sites, although yes, they are rare... and I think most of them are above level 2, so cheap priests aren't too helpful. I've never found an unholy site, but some of them are very nice, from the descriptions.

Re: New empowerment strategy?
 

With ulm, I'm not going to have any 4-holy priests. Especially not with order 3, unluck 3. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/tongue.gif I guess I can go search with my prophet, who is my smith with toughness.

Re: New empowerment strategy?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">You know, that might actually make the "Blood of Humans" theme worthwhile! I would say "half unrest", though, because no unrest for unlimited slaving in the capitol is a bit... omnipotent=)

Re: New empowerment strategy?
 

Can you give me some examples of holy sites? Just to stir the imagination?

Re: New empowerment strategy?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Ancient Temple
Sanctifying Pool
Forgotten Crypt
The Ward
Hidden Monastery

[ November 20, 2003, 18:33: Message edited by: Nerfix ]

Re: New empowerment strategy?
 

The best thing for site searching is the spell Acashic record, which finds all sites in a province regardless of the school. Mountain, forest and wasteland provinces have higher chance to contain magic sites, so maybe you were searching in wrong places? Also, some really cool sites require level 4 to find, so your rainbow mage might not be powerful enough to do it. You can also use school-specific ritual spells to do the searching - they cost gems, but find all sites in that particular school if there are any in the province (it shows as search level 9, although all sites can be found with level 4 when searching without rituals). Rituals are also faster, since you spend 2 turns doing it on foot - one to get in the province and another to search, while you can cast the ritual every turn with sufficient gem income. I think that holy/unholy sites might not be that rare, just that often you don't have good searchers for them, i.e. not something that you would normally use your priests to do, and not many nations that have unholy priests. With Acashic record quite a few of them show up (at least on Orania map so far).

In addition to regular blood sites, Mictlan's home province has a site that gives you 3 blood slaves.

[ November 20, 2003, 20:46: Message edited by: HJ ]

Re: New empowerment strategy?
 

Thanks, HJ.

Now...to go to my spellbook when I get home...and look up Acashic Record. I don't care if it costs gems, really. And if it were something I could do once a turn...that's better than going from site to site with a rainbow mage.

If 4 is required for a lot of sites though...maybe my rainbow should include a lot more 4's considering the positive bless effects.

Re: New empowerment strategy?
 

Acashic Record does require Conjuration 5 (!), an Astral-3 mage (or an Astral-2 with a Starshine Skullcap / Crystal Coin; more widely available), and a whopping 25 Astral pearls per casting. Most of the single-field divination spells are easier to research (although they're in multiple fields) and often easier to cast (heck, Dark Knowledge is a Death-1). They're also far cheaper.
If you've bootstrapped your gem income to the point where 25 Astral isn't much (note: that's enough for a Juggernaut, or an Imprint Souls, or half an Angelic Host, or a quarter of a Wish..., or 187.5 gold after conVersion to fire gems, etc), and the magical site frequency is rather high, it might be useful to you. Or if you're playing single-player or against human players that are also playing less than brutally optimized, I suppose.
Hm. In Dom I, you sometimes used to be able to *know* that there were at least X magical sites in a province because there were four slots, and when one was found it revealed the site in the slot corresponding to an arbitrary order. If you lit up a site in Slot #4, you knew there were three other magical sites present, and thus it might be a good Acashic Record candidate especially if you lacked the mages to cast the single-site divination spells or you also wanted the holy/unholy sites. The new interface fixes that.

Re: New empowerment strategy?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">I didn't say that it's the most cost-effective way, just that it's the best way to find them. The way the initial poster presented his case, it seems that he wanted to know what sites are there in the first place, and how to find them (I myself am still much in that phase). Of course there are optimal ways to find sites, but Acashic record is great for exploring the game's variety and all that, and also to get access to gem variety that you are not normally able to. And yes, I'm talking about leisurely paced SP games I play, where I want to see everything that game has to offer.

[ November 20, 2003, 21:38: Message edited by: HJ ]

Re: New empowerment strategy?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">It's not, only for the most powerful ones. Lots of sites are level 1-2. Magic level 2 will enable you to cast site-searching spells (auspex, haruspex, voice of apsu, augury, bowl of blood) or even level 1 is enough (dark knowledge and arcane probing), so once you find first couple of sites to get some gem income rolling, you can start casting them to increase it further in a faster and easier way than hopping from province to province. Arcane probing is especially nice, since it gives you access to astral pearls, which you can more easily convert to other gem types in order to cast that school site-searching as well. However, you can find holy/unholy sites only through Acashic record, unless you search with priests. So if you want to see those, this is the way to go.

[ November 20, 2003, 21:41: Message edited by: HJ ]

Re: New empowerment strategy?
 

On the other hand, casting a single-discipline spell isn't always faster than searching with a mage who has more than one discipline, since searching in-person searches with all of the mage's disciplines at once.

PvK

Re: New empowerment strategy?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">That's also true. And that's why Acashic record is the fastest way to find all the sites if you have enough gems to do it every turn.

Also, if you're interested in only single variety of gems, then divination spells are probably faster way to achieve that.

[ November 21, 2003, 02:56: Message edited by: HJ ]